is the little world of man compared, and made more like the universal, (man being the measure of all things; Homo est mensura omnium rerum, saith Aristotle and Pythagoras,) that the four complexions resemble the four elements, and the seven ages of man the seven planets; whereof our infancy is compared to the moon, in which we seem only to live and grow, as plants; the second age to Mercury, wherein we are taught and instructed; our third age to Venus, the days of love, desire, and vanity; the fourth to the sun, the strong, flourishing, and beautiful age of man's life; the fifth to Mars, in which we seek honour and victory, and in which our thoughts travel to ambitious ends; the sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter, in which we begin to take account of our times, judge of ourselves, and grow to the perfection of our understanding; the last and seventh to Saturn, wherein our days are sad, and overcast, and in which we find by dear and lamentable experience, and by the loss which can never be repaired, that of all our vain passions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth: our attendants are sicknesses, and variable infirmities; and by how much the more we are accompanied with plenty, by so much the more greedily is our end desired, whom when time hath made unsociable to others, we become a burden to ourselves: being of no other use, than to hold the riches we have from our successors. In this time it is, when (as aforesaid) we, for the most part, and never before, prepare for our eternal habitation, which we pass on unto with many sighs, groans, and sad thoughts, and in the end, by the workmanship of death, finish the sorrowful business of a wretched life; towards which we always travel both sleeping and waking; neither have those beloved companions of honour and riches any power at all to hold us any one day by the glorious promise of entertainments; but by what crooked path soever we walk, the same leadeth on directly to the house of death, whose doors lie open at all hours, and to all persons. For this tide of man's life, after it once

t Arist. 10. Metaph. c. 1. f.

turneth and declineth, ever runneth with a perpetual ebb and falling stream, but never floweth again: our leaf once fallen, springeth no more; neither doth the sun or the summer adorn us again, with the garments of new leaves, and flowers.

Redditur arboribus florens revirentibus ætas;
Ergo non homini, quod fuit ante, redit.

To which I give this sense.

The plants and trees made poor and old
By winter envious,

The spring-time bounteous

Covers again from shame and cold:

But never man repair'd again
His youth and beauty lost,
Though art, and care, and cost,
Do promise nature's help in vain.

And of which Catullus, Epigram 53.
Soles occidere et redire possunt :
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

The sun may set and rise :
But we contrarywise

Sleep after our short light
One everlasting night.

For if there were any baiting place, or rest, in the course or race of man's life, then, according to the doctrine of the Academics, the same might also perpetually be maintained; but as there is a continuance of motion in natural living things, and as the sap and juice, wherein the life of plants is preserved, doth evermore ascend or descend; so is it with the life of man, which is always either increasing towards ripeness and perfection, or declining and decreasing towards rottenness and dissolution.

SECT. VI.

Of the free power which man had in his first creation to dispose of himself.

THESE be the miseries which our first parents brought on all mankind, unto whom God in his creation gave a free and unconstrained will, and on whom he bestowed the liberal choice of all things, with one only prohibition, to try his gratitude and obedience. God set before him a mortal and immortal life, a nature celestial and terrene; and, indeed, God gave man to himself, to be his own guide, his own workman, and his own painter, that he might frame or describe unto himself what he pleased, and make election of his own form. u God made man in the beginning, saith Siracides, and left him in the hands of his own counsel. Such was the liberality of God, and man's felicity: whereas beasts, and all other creatures reasonless, brought with them into the world, saith Lucilius, and that even when they first fell from the bodies of their dams, the nature which they could not change; and the supernal spirits or angels were from the beginning, or soon after, of that condition, in which they remain in perpetual eternity. But (as aforesaid) God gave unto man all kind of seeds and grafts of life, to wit, the vegetative life of plants, the sensual of beasts, the rational of man, and the intellectual of angels; whereof whichsoever he took pleasure to plant and cultive, the same should futurely grow in him, and bring forth fruit, agreeable to his own choice and plantation. This freedom of the first man Adam, and our first father, was enigmatically described by Asclepius Atheniensis, saith Mirandula, in the person and fable of Proteus, who was said, as often as he pleased, to change his shape. To the same end were all those celebrated metamorphoses among the Pythagoreans and ancient poets, wherein it was feigned that men were transformed into divers shapes of beasts, thereby to shew the change of men's conditions, from rea

u Eccles. xv. 14.

son to brutality, from virtue to vice, from meekness to cruelty, and from justice to oppression. For by the lively image of other creatures did those ancients represent the variable passions and affections of mortal men; as by serpents were signified deceivers; by lions, oppressors and cruel men; by swine, men given over to lust and sensuality; by wolves, ravening and greedy men; which also St. Matthew resembleth to false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves; by the images of stones and stocks, foolish and ignorant men; by vipers, ungrateful men; of which y St. John Baptist, O ye generation of vipers, &c.

SECT. VII.

Of God's ceasing to create any more: and of the cause thereof, because the universal created was exceeding good.

IN this work of man, God finished the creation; not that God laboured as a man, and therefore rested for God commanded, and it was finished, Cui voluisse est fecisse; "With whom to will is to make," saith Beda. Neither did God so rest, that he left the world made, and the creatures therein to themselves: for, My Father worketh to this day, saith Christ, and I work; but God rested, that is, he created no new species or kinds of creatures, but (as aforesaid) gave unto man a power generative, and so to the rest of living creatures, and to plants and flowers their seeds in themselves; and commanded man to amultiply and fill the earth, and the earth and sea to bring forth creatures according to their several kinds: all which being finished, God saw that his works were good; not that he foreknew not, and comprehended not, the beginning and end before they were; for God made every plant of the field before it was in the earth; but he gave to all things which he had created the name of good, thereby to teach men, that from so good a God there was nothing made but that which was

* Matt. vii. 15.

y Matt. iii. 7.

z John v. 17.

a Gen. i. 28, and ver. 22. 24.

perfect good, and from whose simple purity, and from so excellent a cause, there could proceed no impure or imperfect effect. For man having a free will and liberal choice, purchased by disobedience his own death and mortality; and for the cruelty of man's heart was the earth afterward cursed, and all creatures of the first age destroyed, but the righteous man Noah and his family, with those creatures which the ark contained, reserved by God to replenish the earth.

CHAP. III.

Of the place of paradise.

SECT. I.

That the seat of paradise is greatly mistaken; and that it is no marvel that men should err.

CONCERNING the first habitation of man, we read, that the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he made, Gen. ii. 8. Of this seat and place of paradise, all ages have held dispute; and the opinions and judgments have been in effect as divers, among those that have written upon this part of Genesis, as upon any one place therein, seeming most obscure: some there are, that have conceived the being of the terrestrial paradise, without all regard of the world's geography, and without any respect of east and west, or any consideration of the place where Moses wrote, and from whence he directed (by the quarters of the heavens) the way how to find out and judge, in what region of the world this garden was by God planted, wherein he was exceeding respective and precise. Others, by being themselves ignorant in the Hebrew, followed the first interpretation; or, trusting to their own judgments, understood one place for another: and one error is so fruitful, as it begetteth a thousand children, if the licentiousness thereof be not timely restrained. And thirdly, those writers which gave themselves to follow